“Is WoW the WoW-killer?” or “Goliath’s Fall”

In November, World of Warcraft will celebrate its 8th anniversary. It would have been eight years since we walked, awestruck, through the frozen tundra of Dun Morogh, and the bleak terrain of the Barrens. Spawning endless memes, giving birth to a new revolution in the MMO industry, defining and redefining what an MMO could be, WoW continued to climb in both popularity and subscription numbers for nearly seven years.

Shortly after the release of Cataclysm however, there was a decline. Wired magazine’s Game|Life has a very strong argument for why World of Warcraft has lost its cool, and how evidence suggests that the Goliath in the MMO world may be the cause for its own undoing. Many reasons are cited, from aging technology and a subscription model that audiences no longer connect with in a post-F2P world, to a decline in the mental maturity of the general player base.

Personally I think they need to innovate beyond better looking dungeons, world events and pet battles. The new expansion has a lot of cool features, but it seems to me these features were implemented begrudgingly, only after other MMOs beat them to the chase. For example, in WoW, pre-MoP, you would need to loot everything manually, which was a major time-sink for players of the farming persuasion. SW:TOR came out with AoE looting, and weeks later it was announced as a feature for MoP. Lame.

I think WoW needs to make a big, bold change, and soon. Or Goliath won’t need a David to fall.

How do you mean Silki? My faith in Blizzard is, mostly, unwavering. But I find myself questioning the developer ever since Diablo 3. Most studios would be content with releasing a good hack n’ slash. Blizzard seemed intent on building one that had a ton of replayability (mostly artificial), and a long tail end. It’s not an MMO man, it’s OK if people don’t play it past a certain point…

Counterpoint: a big, bold change is likely to alienate more players than it brings in. Ensuring the game is profitable and fun to the people who are currently playing is probably the safest and best strategy for blizzard – let the game age gracefully and keep working on Titan, I say.

A big bold change does not have to come in the form of sweeping on in-game changes. Think of how many people would come back if today the game went F2P. With 9 million + players, that is still highly unlikely, but imagine if Blizzard took that step…

To me, it seems most of the “innovation” coming from Blizzard these days is reactionary, rather than proactive.